Friday, October 12

Rex Ray Art & Design is a must-have cool new book celebrating Ray's fun, retro-modern looking collages, paintings and prints. Rex Ray is a San Francisco-based artist whose work is highly collectible by both designers and serious art collectors, and perhaps soon by a nearly penniless design blogger.

Rex began his career as a graphic designer in Ad Land, and like a lot of art directors, felt the hands of the suits in the marketing department manipulating his original vision until he couldn't recognize his work at all. In an effort to release his frustrations, he began cutting up his ads from magazines and creating paper collages of all kinds, and did these therapeutically every night for some time. After discovering he had well over a thousand of these handmade collages Rex realized he was onto something! A new art form that he really enjoyed making, maybe as much as I like looking at them.

Rex Ray lives and works in San Francisco’s Mission District with his dog, Skeeter. On his site, he says his home is rarely as tidy as in the photos seen here. But, whoa, it's pretty fabulous. I do hope he got the memo about me and Coop moving in. Just finding us curled up on the lovely green sofa, my head resting on that fluffy pink pillow could be a little awkward.

You can find more of his work on his site and his resin collages are sold at Jonathan Adler. Also, be sure and check out the video clip of an interview with Rex Ray on the amazon site. Most enjoyable. Thanks for sharing your work with the world, Rex, looking at your work, I think I can feel your escape from Ad Land and the happiness and freedom it's brought you.

11 comments:

oh i do heart rex ray so! i posted about him a while back too {when his work was displayed at the b-of-a building}. his work will be in my home someday, it just must! ;o)http://studiowellspring.blogspot.com/2007/02/lets-talk-about-rex.html

What fabulous work! Thanks for the intro to Mr. Ray. I once worked in advertising in New York for six months - it was all I could stand! So I can understand what drives a graphic artist to seek greener pastures.